Cloud architectures are used in cloud computing and cloud storage systems for offering infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud services. Examples of cloud architectures include the VMware vCloud™ Director cloud architecture software, Amazon EC2™ web service, and OpenStack™ open source cloud computing service. IaaS cloud service is a type of cloud service that provides access to physical and/or virtual resources in a cloud environment. These services provide a tenant application programming interface (API) that supports operations for manipulating IaaS constructs, such as virtual machines (VMs) and logical networks. One operation provided by some services is the transfer to the cloud system of VMs on existing computing resources managed by customers. VMs can encompass large amounts of data on the order of tens or hundreds of gigabytes (GB) or even more. Thus, transfer of a VM to the cloud system over a network, such as the public Internet, can take a tong time to complete and consume significant resources.